


Ignorance, Is That Their Happy State?

by azure_horizon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:56:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azure_horizon/pseuds/azure_horizon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their old world has crumbled around them and he relishes the thought of rebuilding it; imperfect and broken. Theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignorance, Is That Their Happy State?

**Author's Note:**

> Writing meme. Take the first sentence of each chapter of the book you are reading and write whatever comes to mind for each. I used _The Passion of new Eve_ by Angela Carter.

_The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies…_

He’d picked her up in a bar several nights before and hadn’t told her he’d be leaving in the morning to go to Afghanistan. Perhaps it was callous but she’d been the one to go on her knees in the hallway outside the mostly deserted men’s loos and he’d been the one to ask for her number and offer to take her out. If she’d been surprised, she’d did a remarkable job of not showing it.

So he’s in the cinema – a dinky little thing on the outskirts of St Andrews – settling in for a night of Newman re-runs. He doesn’t mind, it takes his mind off the fact that in a few hours he will be heading to the barracks and then a few hours after that, heading off to the air field to be shipped out to Helmand.

And the fact that she’s on her knees again isn’t bad either.

 _Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the city._

When Sherlock arrives in London from Sussex for the very first time, he’s seventeen, wide-eyed and searching for his brother. Father has left and Mycroft has been incommunicado for insufferably long after the last family dispute. Sherlock can’t stand the Downs anymore, the icy interior or their crumbling history, Mummy’s indifference. He hates school, he hates life and if he doesn’t get out of there he’s sure he won’t be alive in a year.

He doesn’t find Mycroft but he finds Mycroft’s flat and he moves into the spare bedroom with his tiny hold-all bag and doesn’t look back.

It takes a few days of aimless wandering before he finds the underground boxing ring, a few weeks more before he plucks up the courage to try his hand at it. He ends up being escorted back to Mycroft’s flat by one of the more benevolent of the thugs who only doesn’t steal anything of Mycroft’s because there’s nothing worth stealing. He goes back a few weeks later and he manages to hold out longer and longer each time until, a few months into it, he KOs his first opponent.

It’s enough, for a while. Until Mycroft comes back from ‘overseas’ (Asia, somewhere but Sherlock can’t narrow it down much further than that). He sends to Mummy for money (she hadn’t even really noticed that Sherlock was gone, five months after he’s left) and ships Sherlock off to University College London and a dingy flat that Sherlock has to wait tables to help fund.

He hates waiting tables so he gets his SIA license and he works as a bouncer on the door to some of the best and seediest clubs in town.

He confiscates a bag of coke from some semi-celebrity or other and curiosity gets the better of him.

It’s a slippery slope from then on.

 

 _The road._

They’re having a laugh in the Humvee on their way back from a small outing to an outpost when it happens.

It’s an IED. It doesn’t make it to the news because no one dies but four lives are ruined. One loses a leg, another an eye and shrapnel is lodged into Murray’s head so that he’ll never speak properly again. John’s the lucky one because he was just shot in the shoulder and developed a psychosomatic limp. They’re all discharged after long stays in hospital (John contracts Enteric Fever and puts back his recovery by almost two months) and they make no promises to keep in touch.

 _I am lost, quite lost in the middle of the desert._

The hallucinations are the worst. He sees sandy deserts and giant snakes and when he tries to run his feet sink into quicksand and he can’t move and the snakes coil around him and squeeze and squeeze and his heart feels like it’s about to explode in his imploding chest.

The sand is so viscous and he looks down but it’s pools of blood, his blood, oozing out of his exploded chest and it’s cold and when he looks up there’s snow around him, quickly melting and drowning him and he can’t breathe, he can’t-

He wakes with a start, his muscles feeling like they are trying to feel away from his bones and he screams into the night around him.

“Mycroft!”

 _On a road that ran through an insane landscape of pale honeycombed peak in unstable, erratic structures… I so found myself entirely at the desert’s mercy._

The nightmares are as horrific as he thought they would be. He’s sweating in his cold room, the remnants of the desert heat spiking his internal thermostat and he wants very much to go for a shower but his legs are shaking so badly that his knees are knocking and that’s when he’s lying down, never mind trying to stand. His shoulder hurts and he pushes his fists against the bulging skin and knotted, gnarled muscle and tries to steady his breathing.

He’s still trying three hours later when the sun comes up.

 _Descend lower._

He’s in the flat in Montague Street, another dive that’s all he can afford considering Mycroft is dealing with his accounts. He has no steady income to speak of and no club will employ him now with his history of drug abuse. What little money he makes from boxing he quickly spends on lab equipment and books so that he’s not tempted to spend it on narcotics instead. Mycroft comes around once every fortnight, sniffing disdainfully at the dingy living room filled to bursting with books and equipment.

“I spoke with the Inspector who arrested you last year.” Sherlock wants to look up but he doesn’t. He plucks a string on his violin (Mycroft knows he can’t take too much away from Sherlock or else he really _will_ go back to the drugs) and scowls at the notes he imagines floating through the air. “He’s agreed to allow you access to a few crime scenes. If you’re amenable, of course.”

Sherlock scoffs.

“How much did you pay him? How often is he to check up on me and report back to you?”

“He’s willing to put aside your history with narcotics given that even while high you managed to spot significant details at the crime scene at which he arrested you.” Mycroft pauses and Sherlock is tempted to look up, so tempted because despite his hatred of Mycroft for leaving him in that ‘facility’, alone, he’s almost grateful. Not quite, though. “Of course, you can’t go to crime scenes dressed like that.” Sherlock’s in all that he can afford – a pair of ill-fitting Topman jeans, a Primark tee-shirt and an American Apparel hoodie that he picked up in the sale – and he hates it. It’s the worst dressed he’s ever been in his life. Even when he’d been what most people would call a ‘junkie’ he’d been dressed in impeccably tailored clothing that cost more than the flat he currently occupies. “I will have my assistant take you to Savile Row tomorrow, shall I?”

Sherlock’s head tilts up marginally and Sherlock knows Mycroft takes it as the acquiescent gesture it is.

 _I know nothing._

John’s always thought of himself as quite clever. Next to Sherlock, he’s a bumbling idiot.

What’s more surprising is that Sherlock keeps surprising him. Keeps reminding him that while Sherlock knows almost all there is to know about John, John knows next to nothing about Sherlock. It started with the drug bust (but he explained that away as not knowing Sherlock for even a full day); next was the one hundred pound limit on the credit card in his wallet, the lack of debit card and hard cash Sherlock carried with him; Mummy wasn’t a benevolent motherly figure, as evidenced by the fact that neither Mycroft nor Sherlock went to her funeral when she’d died (John had opened the letter from her lawyer, the same way he opened all of Sherlock’s mail now) to Sherlock’s newly discovered sex drive.

And even then it’s as if John knows nothing. He’s only ever been with two men and they’d preferred it a little rough and ready but Sherlock’s sensitivity and overactive mind mean that he can’t handle it quite that hard, or fast. It needs to be slow and it’s incredibly sensual the way that that Sherlock’s body undulates as though in slow motion, the way that his breath stutters out of his mouth in shuddering gusts that set John aflame.

He’d thought that Sherlock wouldn’t be affectionate – and he’s not, not really but he is in an entirely Sherlockian way. He crowds John onto the couch and then flops down with his head on John’s lap and pushes his hair into John’s palm until John cards his fingers through it for hours and hours. He wears John’s clothes and uses his toothbrush and John’s all right with that.

He knows next to nothing about Sherlock. But he’s enjoying the slow acquisition of knowledge.

 _The moon slipped over the round horizon._

Sherlock sits on a bench outside of the crematorium. The wall is glass and he can see in to the empty coffin, to the hunched figures of Lestrade, Mrs Hudson… John. _John_.

His world is already dimmer, knowing what he’s done. Knowing the John-sized hole he’s created in it all of his own accord. It might be bright and sunny on this late April day but his world is cold and dark, transitional. There’s no light – no John.

He stops himself from getting too sentimental – that was always John’s job.

(And he’d been so good at it, hadn’t he? Imagine the ‘sentiment’ he’ll be feeling now- _no_. No.)

The crowd stands to leave and Sherlock waits until John is back in the family car with Mycroft (the latter of whom had glanced in his direction before ducking into the saloon car). He sits for a while longer, until his phone buzzes in his pocket (new, of course, untraceable in that way that anything Mycroft gives him is untraceable).

 **He’ll be taken care of.**

Sherlock leaves.

 _The cold wind of solitude blew about her house…_

He moves out of 221B. He still visits Mrs Hudson but she’s not let out the rooms yet, says she can’t. John worries about her finances but she assures him that Sherlock had bequeathed enough to her for her to retire in peace (and that had been a surprise, another thing that John discovers about Sherlock, all these little bites of knowledge acquired after he’d been cast out into the wilderness). He only goes up to the rooms once, and there’s a fine coat of dust there that tells him Mrs Hudson can’t go up there, either.

The window Sherlock had opened after the incident with the purple powder (that had resulted in giggles and a shared shower and some infinitely exquisite sex) is still open.

He can’t bring himself to shut it.

 _They treated me kindly as they knew how because they thought I had been wronged…_

He takes a lover in Genoa, and another in Queensland. He cries silently afterwards each time they have sex (which isn’t often, only when he’s a little high and even then not on cocaine) and they all coddle him and treat him as though he’s fragile. He supposes to them he is. They don’t know that he’s killed four people with his bare hands and two people with a gun. He supposes that makes him a little broken inside and he supposes that they see that, that they want to fix it.

He lets them think that they can, for a little while until he gets bored of them. Until the fact that they are _not John_ becomes too much.

 _Eve on the run again, under a sky fissured with artificial fire and the distant rumble of a bombardment – a wild night; but I was pelting off towards my only home, my lover’s grave…_

John sits on the window ledge, his feet hanging out of the window as he looks across the vast vineyard. The sun is setting, a fiery auburn orb that burns the very edges of the horizon and stretches until it is extinguished by the deep indigo of night. Behind the house the remnants of the summer storm rumble in the distance and the air has that fresh feel to it that cleanses his senses.

He’d been picked up in Highbury by Mycroft who had told him only two things: that Sherlock was alive and that he was in the Rhone Valley, on their family estate.

Now John is here, too, and Sherlock is pretending to be busy in the kitchen so as to give John space to breathe, to calm down because for _fuck’s sake_ the man had supposedly been dead for three years.

Supposedly.

“Christ…” John murmurs as he leans against the window pane. His heart feels like it’s about to explode from the pressure it has been under these last nine hours. The sight of Sherlock too thin but alive had sent him to his knees in a bundle of tears and bitter, bitter rage.

He had eventually consoled himself to never seeing Sherlock again, was just beginning to get over him when this… this. God.

He can hear Sherlock’s approach but he keeps his back to the room, keeps his stooped posture in the window. Sherlock stills at the edge of the room.

“Do you hate me, John?”

And there’s something so vulnerable, so broken about the way that Sherlock says it that John turns to look at him. His hair is shorter than John has ever seen it. He’s too pale and too thin and he doesn’t look well and John wants to hate him, wants to hurt him the way that Sherlock has hurt him.

“Right now? Yes.”

Sherlock’s eyes flutter shut, a line appears between his eyebrows for a long moment before he nods.

“Will you ever not-“

“I don’t know. You… you left me, Sherlock. You let me think you were dead for three years. I hate you for that. I don’t think that will ever go away.”

Sherlock nods.

“You’re here, though.”

John concedes with a nod.

“I had to see.” He doesn’t say the ‘you’ but it’s implied.

“And now?”

John shrugs.

“I don’t know, Sherlock.”

“I love you.”

John’s breath catches in his chest and his heart is back at that rapid pumping thing that makes him feel light-headed. He hates it. He hates Sherlock for saying this to him _now_ ; hates the way it takes him back three years to that morning with the purple powder and the shower and he thinks about how happy he had been, thinks that Sherlock had known even then what he was going to do, thinks about what that really means.

“You have a funny way of showing it Sherlock.”

Sherlock nods.

“I know.” He swallows. “But I do.” He sighs and he looks so broken and John steps forward and Sherlock sags, his knees give way and he slides down the door jamb. “I didn’t intend to come back.”

John stands over him, a foot or so away and shakes his head.

“Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better, Sherlock.”

He walks out, goes to one of the guest rooms. He doesn’t sleep.

\--

The next morning, Sherlock is still propped up against the wall and John reaches down and rouses him, pulling him up and into the bed John just vacated. He doesn’t linger long after Sherlock drops back to sleep but he knows he can’t leave for good.

“Are you staying?” Mycroft Holmes asks over the phone and John sighs.

“Yeah, for now.”

“Good. That’s… good.”

John’s not sure he agrees.

\--

Sherlock stumbles into the living room several hours later and John looks up, startled.

“Oh, thank God. I thought I dre-“ He cuts himself off and runs a hand over his haggard face and up into his greasy hair. John stands and moves passed Sherlock towards the kitchen and Sherlock follows him closely and John can hear Sherlock inhale deeply a few times. He tries not to smile. “Are you-“

“I’m going to make you something to eat.”

“I’m not hun-“

“Something light. Fruit, yoghurt and some granola, okay? I don’t think your metabolism could handle much more than that right now. We’ll need to work on it.”

John knows what he’s saying; he hopes Sherlock does. It takes a moment but then Sherlock’s breath is exhaled against the back of John’s neck, there are arms around his chest and a face in his neck.

“Yes. Yes.”

John stays in the embrace for a long moment before gently pulling himself away to prepare Sherlock’s food. Sherlock’s presence lingers in his personal space but John doesn’t mind.

“Eat this, shower… then we’ll talk.”

“Yes.” Sherlock stares at him for a long moment and John can see the relief spreading throughout Sherlock’s posture. Can see the tension of the last three years seeping out of his body and John can feel it leaving his. For the first time since John made his decision to stick this out, he truly thinks that they can do it. Truly believes that he wants to. “Yes.”

This time, Sherlock’s the one who knows nothing and John feels a little bit like what Eve must have after biting into the apple; empowered, knowledgeable, condemned.

Their old world has crumbled around them and he relishes the thought of rebuilding it; imperfect and broken.

Theirs.


End file.
